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It’s been great seeing developers picking up the Carrington theme framework and using it. We wanted to get these fixes and features out ASAP as a result.

This version has a couple of changes – both bug fixes and new features:

Added support for meta-{key}.php content templates (previously supported only meta-{key}-{value}.php templates) as requested.

Added a field for entering the About text that is shown in the sidebar. If this is present, the /about page content is not used. The content of this field is passed through regular WordPress filters for formatting, etc.

Fixed a layout bug with comment links.

Adjusted some header tag spacing.

Abstracted all general templates (header, sidebar, etc.) – this was not working completely in 1.1.

Wow. You know, I’ve took a look through Carrington, and it seems to me to be excessively complicated and far, far more difficult to use than normal WordPress theming methods. Perhaps you should write some articles explaining, in great amounts of detail, what the advantages and disadvantages are, because frankly, I’m not seeing any serious advantages. Because right now, the whole thing seems like little more than complexity for complexity’s sake.

I’ve written a great deal already, here and here; explaining the reasons for the framework and the benefits of it. I can tell you unequivocally that the theme framework has saved us a ton of development time and our clients a great deal of money already.

If you don’t immediately see the benefits of the framework, then you likely aren’t doing the sort of theme development that would greatly benefit from it.

I’ll likely put out some additional tutorials at some point in the future, but these things don’t write themselves.

Otto: Looks to me like a successful attempt to apply a highly organized hierarchal structure to WordPress templating. Instead of stacking a lot of functionality into a single file (say, index.php or page.php), each type of page is broken down into functional units, which are then arranged as desired (kind of like “glossaries” in old WordPect). This makes page design and troubleshooting extremely easy, as compared to pouring through a lot of convoluted code.

That’s not to say I’m going to change the way I’m working now — I’ve got a “system” going that’s working for me. But, if I didn’t, and were doing a lot of client work, I’d certainly give this a very hard look.